Snacko News

No longer blinds you when you walk into the plains during a rainy day!

If I had a nickel for every cozy farm sim I played this month with a Paper Mario visual design that begins with getting washed up after a shipwreck I'd have two nickels. One was Echoes of the Plum Grove, and this one is Snacko, the ridiculously cute cat-themed farm sim. Snacko turned up at the Wholesome Snack show today (how appropriate) and announced that it's launching into early access today. Surprise!..
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Meowllo! Spooky season is over, now it’s cake season. I mean, November is almost December, right? That’s how that works? It’s already snowing where I live, so it’s December for all I know.

Anyways! We have lots of big important things to cover this month, so I’ll leave the intro short~



We came to this decision after a lot of thought and discussion on where Snacko is, and where we want it to be for you, the player. This gives us time to do a final polish pass, expand on some of the existing content the way we want, localization, MORE QA, and implement community feedback!

[h2]A lot of things have factored into this, so lemme run them through you. Before that, I know it’s a lot of text, so the gist of it is:[/h2]

• The game’s story and core loop is complete and playable, but there is room for more content and polish
  
• Localization and porting takes time to both do, and do well for a game of this genre and scope
  
• We want to fine-tune the pacing and balance for everything: crafting progression, relationships, all that fun stuff
  
• We will be working with our QA team to try to maintain save file integrity, but the possibility exists that changing content or fixing a major bug update may impact your save files as updates are released.
  
• I’ll post a separate update that goes into more of the dry details of how EA will look like, our plans, and the rough update schedule during the time period, along with some other important things in the future.
  

Now, the long version:



Yes, you can play through the main story. Yes, all the dialogue is written and you can do everything else you’d expect in the game, like...farm, explore, build, craft, date...cow.

But, there’s a lot of polish and balancing we’d like to adjust. We’re about a month into our Kickstarter-only beta now, and it’s been very helpful to get feedback from players, so we’d like to continue that vibe for a little longer through early access!



Part of that is yeah, it’s mostly just the two of us working on the game full-time. (Including support from some of the talented contractors we’ve worked with, of course!) The game has (unsurprisingly) ballooned into quite a hefty game over the last couple of years since we started. It sure does feel great to say “the whole game is playable now!” but it’s been long enough that we feel like the additional time will really help Snacko go from “yay” to “WAHOO”. You know what I mean?

[h2]There’s lots of stuff that is already playable but we want to improve:[/h2]

• Better mines experience, more floors with more variation
  
• Player house expansion, wallpaper and flooring options
  
• Little world activities and events, more festivals
  
• Proposing and a more in-depth post-bonding life (don’t worry you can romance and date everyone eligible in early access!)
  
• UI/UX (including controllers!) polish
  
• Better tutorials and documentation in the game for those of us that need more help (me, that’s me. I need more help)
  
• More accessibility options and better settings
  
• Additional craftables
  
• ...and obviously, bug fixes
  

For weaker computers and consoles especially, we want to dedicate time to make sure it runs well and feels really good with a controller to play. These are things that will take us some time and a couple rounds of playtesting and fine-tuning to really get right, but we think having the game play well on both keyboard/mouse and controller with a stable framerate is very important!
In fact, the month of October was heavily focused on making UI/UX improvements. We’ve been working on a new system (we call it SnackoUI, very original) that has made it easier to make functional buttons and screens that will just work with controllers. It’s very exciting.



(Keep in mind at this point when this message was sent, I haven’t seen recursive in a whole week. We live in the same house. He is my husband.)

Poor recursive did...wilt a little bit creating the system, but it’ll make things go much faster (with less bugs) in the near future. In fact, we’re already reaping the rewards now! No more “1 business day spent on a single UI screen to get it to work with a controller”!!!

Zoro also spent time profiling where a lot of the performance bottlenecks were and remaking certain portions of features to improve it.



Now, with the worries of “oh no not another UI screen” out of the way, we’ve been able to spruce up some existing screens to make them feel and play better.


(Before!)


(Now!!!)

The poor arcade machine at the grocer’s just...Yeah, it was rough.



PC is relatively easy to test on, make fixes for, and update. But that kind of exponentially grows as you tack on more things, like other languages and console releases.



While working on finalizing the text earlier this year, it became pretty limiting to keep the text as-is and not make any more changes or additions. It became clear that we just had to add more text, especially with small tutorials and other flavor text to help the world come together.



But unfortunately, the process of writing, making sure I didn’t spell mackerel wrong again, sending it off to get localized, reimported, QA’d in the new language...

It’s just a lot of time and effort. With the two of us, it meant if we were working on localization implementation, we couldn’t work on bug fixing or polish. So, we decided to focus on making the base game better before worrying about controller support or additional language support.



So like, I guess I never thought about this in depth, but one of the downsides of having a more sand-boxy type of game where you have a lot to collect and craft and a lot of characters to talk to means that it’ll also take a long time to test.



Sure, we’ve got debug commands and systems to help us test if something works, but people have to actually play through it to see when the pacing feels off, or when an activity or goal is just too grindy.
Bubbafare, one of our long-time supporters, was a huge help as they played...a hundred hours during beta.



Not sure how, but thank you very much.

So, early access will give us more time to nudge numbers back and forth and play more of the game ourselves to see where we can improve the experience. One feature we’d like to implement that was a brainchild from beta and Discord suggestions was difficulty modes. An easier difficulty setting would make days longer, actions cost less stamina, etc.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble (I started to ramble 8 paragraphs ago my bad).

[h2]At the end of the day, Snacko is our baby. Well, a 5 year old child at this point. Bro’s in kindergarten already. But it’s a game that we’ve put a lot into, and we want to really make sure that the full release alongside the console versions live up to the effort and love we’ve put into the game so far.[/h2]


(Snacko in 2019! Wait, look how different the inside of the player house looks, too!)


Optimization, polish, balancing tweaks, bug fixes...I’m just very, very happy we’re finally at the point in development where we can worry about things like this, versus implementing basic things, like cutscenes.

Thank you very, veryveryvery much for reading all of this, and reading all of my updates.





[h2]Thank you (again) for reading this month’s long update! Keep your eyes peeled for news coming soon![/h2]

HELLO EVERYONE I’m like half a month late with this, but! There’s a good reason!

[h2]Snacko beta for Kickstarter backers has been released! Into the wild! Live!! Playable![/h2]

Actually, that was like, almost two weeks ago at this point. But because of the beta release, I have been a withered husk of a person. My Slack profile picture really encapsulates how I feel right now.

(If you haven’t, you should totally read the webtoon “The Greatest Estate Developer”!!)

I have re-alived myself to report what we’ve been up to!


Well, obviously, lots of bug fixes. We went through internal QA, but bugs always slip through the cracks. They are simply too small. We probably spent the first 4 days doing nonstop fixes for things like falling out of a collision hole, etc.

Luckily, there was nothing huge. So, we are alive and happy with how it went.

Right before the launch though, we had a lot of super special surprising (SSS) bugs pop out of nowhere. Like, literally, where did you guys come from?

My favourite, that dealt severe spiritual damage to my already weak psyche, was this one:

We were working in a voice call together. Motivated by the beta launch in the horizon, the three of us work quietly, excited to wrap up the build for the night for QA to test in the morning.
And then suddenly, Zoro asks,

“Hey, um…is your guys’ house…sideways?”

Silence.

Recursive, worried, responds, “what do you mean…sideways?”

Zoro pauses, unable to find the words. “I went in the house, and when I came back out, the world was upside down. And now the house is in the floor. When I jump up…I jump…sideways?”

Nobody makes a sound. The implications of this world-turning (literal) bug happening 24 hours before the beta is set to go live weighs heavily in the call.

After a moment of confusion, I sheepishly ask, “can you show us? Through screen share?”

Zoro turns on his screen share.



Mind you, at this point, I was already on the brink of tears for a whole week after the whole main scenario refused to work despite the story being tested and played through multiple times by QA at this point (it was easy bug to fix…happened because we added debug functionality). So, I did have a wee bit of a freak out but it ended up being an easy bug to fix.

Asides from doing hotfixes, we’ve also worked on other things! So don’t worry, the rest of the devlog will have many pictures for your enjoyment.


“Make Mesecina statue less ugly” has always been on my to-do list, I just never had the chance to work on it on top of the more pressing bugs. But last month, I did! Left is the old one, right is the new one!



Along with the visual rework, you can now obtain a quest while interacting with it. The statue, broken as you arrive, can be fixed up. Maybe if you pay a visit to it once a day often, something good might happen!



I totally did not want to implement that into the game because I recently got back into Neopets and found myself enjoying doing the dailies…

While we were working on an item duplicating bug with the seedmaker, I also realized the old seed maker was just a little…old.



We also felt like the interact prompt pop-up that often comes up also blocked a lot of the screen. With these two things in mind, we’ve…

• made the seed maker asset more aligned with the other assets
  
• made the pop-up indicator for how many seeds less…stretched
  
• instead of 3 sad seeds when the seed maker has something produced, there’s now different colored seed piles depending on which seeds it’s currently making!
  
• made the interact prompt a little smaller and reduced the opacity for the text portion so you’re not losing as much vision on your screen. The key portion is kept opaque since the readability of which button to press > what the prompt text is
  

The alembic also got a similar treatment, getting a cute little animation, some VFX, and an all new indicator for what elemental fragments it has distilled so far.



And lastly, for the longest time, you couldn’t place any of the crops as a buildable. It was marked as a buildable, but when you tried to actually place a turnip or something, the game would give you an error. So I fixed that! I put em in lil baskets.



All crops now can be placed as a decorative object. Nice!

That’s all we have for this…I mean, last month. I’ll see you in November 👋 Thank you for reading until the end! Getting to Kickstarter beta was a huge milestone for us, so thank you for being patient with us as we put out fires etc etc.

Meowllo everyone! It’s the 60th devlog! That feels like some kind of milestone. The big six zero! This month, there’s a lot of little things that all add to the game in a big way. We combined a list of feedback from our producer, à la angry Steam reviewer, and triaged them based on how much impact it would make versus how much time it would take us to implement.

So let’s get down to covering some of the things we’ve done!

[h2]🐦 IN THE WILD[/h2]

The world felt a little empty and quiet when you walked through it. Sure, half of that might be because I forgot to vertex paint the trees that are in the farm and town so there was no wind effect, but also because until you invite a couple of villagers, it’s just lonely.



One of the things we did to try alleviate this crushing loneliness is by adding wildlife. Now, there’s bugs, birds, and other Snacko fantasy creatures that inhabit the world.



The birds(?) fly from one tree to another and fly away when you get too close. The bees…don’t sting you, so don’t worry.



Bro’s chilling.

[h2]📑 LORE OF THE WORLD[/h2]

We also added more interactable spots, cutscenes, quests, and other bits like that with either stories, items, or letters that make the world feel more alive.



Our hope is now, there’s more to look at and learn about the world of Snacko outside of the main story cutscenes. In the past, we had a lot of lore locked behind befriending certain NPCs, but now there’s also bits of that lore spread across the world.



I don’t want to spoil anything, so you get the most uneventful text box as a preview.

[h2]📽️ CINEMATIC TREES[/h2]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I’ve always had a little cinematic introduction when you first set paw into the plains, but I uh, never did it for the rest of the biomes you can explore.



So I fixed that. It was a lot of fiddling timing. A couple frames here, a couple frames there…before I knew it, it’s been 30 minutes! Scary.

[h2]📦 SMALL TWEAKS[/h2]

The bulk of things were also focused on smaller things, like finishing up UI screens and elements that were unfinished, binding keys that most players would expect (like M for map, or J for Journal).



I also realized there were a few things that didn’t have tutorials. I tried to make them as out of the way as possible. For example, it was never explained to you what the box beside your house was. You just sort of had to eventually guess that it was the overflow storage - where everything goes once your bag fills up.



Now, the first time you interact with it, a tutorial popup tells you about it. I also added a shipping container beside your house, so you don’t have to walk all the way to the other side of the planet to sell your turnips.

The reason why the shipping box is by the path to the town to begin with was so poor Mikan can easily get there in a set amount of time reardless of your farm’s set up. But it proved to be a pain. So now there’s just two of them.



Ehh, the rest of it was a combination of fixing VFX glitches, making so you could click to advance text with your mouse, and other small bits like that. When you hit the tree in the fall, it used to spawn green leaves instead of fall colored leaves. Things like that.
They’re small, but I bet if we didn’t fix them somebody would notice;;



We’ve also tried making small tweaks like adding an option to disable the flashing in the game’s story intro, and making it more obvious when you can’t place an item by making it REDDER.

And that’s all for August! I’m proud of all the work we’ve been able to finish this month. It definitely polished up the game a lot more.

[h3]Thank you for reading until the end! See you next month~[/h3]